Carson 7th-grader builds RC track on school district lot

The employee parking lot on the corner of West Musser Street and North Richmond Avenue across from Carson Middle School offers a unique, student-built recreational oasis that the Carson City School District intends to preserve for now.

CMS seventh-grader Seth Donnelly began building a dirt track with a garage, ramps, monster jumps and a green area in May that he called the “Palindrome” and has now refined and reestablished as the “Palindrome 2.0” to drive his remote control Traxxas vehicle.

“The whole reason why I really built this was because I didn’t have a lot of space at my house at the time,” Donnelly said. “I thought I might want to build something here because this is a whole easement and stuff for all of these houses. It was pretty empty, and it was pretty small at the time.”

School was about to let out a few months ago, and Donnelly began devoting his summer break to building the track with the help of some friends to design a play area from mounds of dirt and using sod and grass. The grass provides a touch of life that Donnelly waters daily. A garage area on the track provides a space for RC vehicles to enter and ramps for them to soar to impressive heights, depending on the size and speed they travel up to, and there’s plenty of room for them to move.

Virgil Berry, district director of operations, said Donnelly’s motivation and transformation of the space is a healthy representation of a student activity during the summer and was considered harmless.

“He was working on this all summer long,” Berry said. “All this upper level stuff wasn’t in the plans. He had this mound and was running his car around and created these walls here, and at one point he a had pool of water with this 5-gallon bucket. … At operations, we were just driving by and watching what he was doing.”

School was not in session, so there was no issue with him using the lot, Berry said.

“It was something he was doing, and we thought, ‘We can’t mow over his hard work, we’ve got to at least let him finish it,’ ” he said. “It was kind of cool to watch him build it up from nothing.”

Berry, who said his hobby when he was younger was to make cabinets using materials he collected from his father, said the area will be as long as possible to keep Donnelly’s efforts going.

“When winter comes, it’ll be hard to keep it intact, but we’ll try to keep the snow back,” he said. “But he’s probably going to come back and do some maintenance. … I have no intention of taking it down. It’s not bothering anybody. It’s not an issue.

“It’s cool to see a kid start out that way,” he said. “Who knows what he’ll become, an engineer?”

Donnelly acknowledged contributions from his friends and the support of his neighbors directly behind the lot. Drivers occasionally stopped to admire his work and he said the track remains open for use to anyone who would like to come and run their own RC vehicles on them.

“I’m also very grateful these neighbors are very kind,” he said.